Query
by foldimort
Summary: There's something rotten in Brockton Bay. A sprawling web of political and economical corruption has its hooks into the failing port city, and nobody seems to know where the tangled web of connections lead. Few even seem willing to ask the question. A Worm/The Question fusion crossover following an unpowered hero's attempts to shine a light on the dark corners of Brockton Bay.
1. Chapter 1

Faultline looked up at the complex map of newspaper articles, photographs, and computer printouts that covered my rear wall. Each document was linked to others in tangled cobweb of twine and colored pins, stretching from the ceiling down to where they were hidden by cardboard boxes piled against the wall.

She was wearing her full costume, a confusion of femininity and belligerence, and the image of her standing among the merely mundane clutter of my tiny office veered towards absurdity. The dark window of her welding mask made her expression hard to read, but I could see flashes of intelligence and humor in her eyes as she looked around at the walls.

She leaned in to read the tiny scrawl on one wrinkled post-it note.

"I never knew that the American Dental Association was related to the Case 53s."

"That's because you're not paying attention."

She turned to face me, and I looked back down at the papers strewn across my desk. The documents were an enigma. Every page so far had told a similar story. Funds misplaced or misdirected. Key staff dismissed at the inopportune times. A string of minor frauds and acts of incompetence with no apparent unifying cause or direction.

"Isn't this all a little much?" Faultline asked, tugging at a taut length of twine with the tip of a gloved finger, trying to strum the connection like a guitar string.

"Hey, don't touch that!"

"Seems like you'd be able to cross-reference all of this 'data' better with a computer," she continued. "They have software now that completely removes the need for twine."

I snorted. "As if that would be secure."

Through the visor of her welding mask I saw her look down at the report strewn across my desk, a computer printout that had been secured and encrypted in a computer system less than two days earlier - or at least, so the woman claimed. I was starting to have my doubts.

The kind of activity logged in the report wouldn't have gone unnoticed by state government, couldn't have. The funneling of funds alone amounted to criminal fraud. It would have been picked up by even a cursory audit, and if the rumors I'd heard about super-powered government watchdog organizations were true, then the local agencies should have been held under a more powerful gaze than the police.

In a small business it would have been unlikely. In an organization as large and as watched as the city government, it was almost unthinkable.

Eventually I pushed the papers into a loose pile, slapped my hand down on them. "I hope you didn't want to be paid for this. It's almost certainly a fake. Someone trying to lead me down a dead end."

She turned away from my board and gave me a sharp look. "It's real, Question. I took it off the city hall computers myself."

"Assuming you're not lying, how sure are you you're not being misled?" I asked. Faultline was a smart girl, and she had a reputation for getting the job done, but she wasn't so invested in this particular question that I could trust her to adeptly navigate an elaborate deception.

"Everything looked good on the night," she said. "Security was _tighter_ than we expected. Nobody left the door open for us, if that's what you're asking."

"Who knew about your little visit to the mayor's office in advance?"

The woman picked her way over to my desk, across the cardboard boxes that littered the floor of my office. She stood in front of the desk and looked down at me. I leaned back and looked up at her. She cut an intimidating figure, but I didn't flinch.

"You, Gregor, Newter, and Spitfire," she said, dropping her hands onto her hips. "Nobody else."

"Any reason to think you've got a Thinker watching you?" I asked.

"No. Do you?"

"They're always watching me," I muttered, looking back down at the stolen documents.

Faultline stepped away and started pushing smaller boxes around with one massive combat boot, clearing a space around the only box big enough to sit on. "Why do you live like this?" Faultline asked, settling onto the box. "This crummy neighborhood, this crappy office."

"Because the truth doesn't pay," I said, pulling out an aggregate city budget sheet from a drawer, starting to cross reference it with the itemized list from Faultline. "Not in this city. Not in this universe."

"You ever think about giving it up?" she asked. "Cleaning up. Maybe even getting a girlfriend?"

On the street outside a police car switched on its siren, and the high pitched wail filled the office for a moment. I used it as an excuse not to reply, silently cross referencing.

After more than ten minutes of silent indexing and cross-referencing I dropped my pen, looked up, and said, "This could actually be genuine. It's almost inconceivable, but it joins enough dots that a multi-agency conspiracy is the least unlikely possibility. Someone in the upper echelons of the city wants to see Brockton fail."

"And people say I'm paranoid."

"Your problem, Faultline, is you've never been paranoid enough." I shuffled the papers and my own notes back into a loose pile, then stuffed them into a manila folder. "The job's good after all. Do you want cash, or information?"

"You have cash?" Faultline asked, looking up at me.

I frowned behind my mask. "I can write a check."

Faultline sighed. "Pass. Better make it information. What have you got?"

"What do you want, specifically."

"You know what I want," Faultline said, her eyes dark behind the visor of her welding mask

"Your 'them' again?" I asked. "Your Omega cabal?"

"'Omega cabal'," she snorted. "It sounds crazy when you say it like that."

"Not at all," I muttered, pulling open a drawer and digging around for a pack of index cards. "There have been dozens of secret societies who've made use of the Greek letter omega over the last century. Masonic lodges, fraternal societies, occult groups, revolutionaries."

"I need something real, Question. Not a fairy tale."

I finished jotting a name onto a blank index card, and slid it towards her across the desk. Faultline stepped over to the desk, and picked it up, examining it in the pale light from the blinded window.

"Who's this?"

"A dentist," I said.

Faultline sighed and let her hand drop to her side. "Damn it, Question-"

"Formerly a Protectorate dentist, on call for the San Jose Protectorate base medical team."

Faultline rolled her eyes. "Fine. I'm listening, as long as this story doesn't involve aliens or mind control."

I stared at her through the translucent material of my mask. "Are you saying I should leave the aliens out?"

She sighed and turned away, looking around at the floor of the office. "Just- go. Start."

"Julia Bergman," I began, tapping the index cart. "Licensed member of the ADA, dental surgeon on call for the San Jose PRT medical team."

Faultline made an impatient turning motion with her hand. "Why should I care."

"The standard procedure upon the discovery of one of the amnesiac parahumans known as 'Case 53s' is to administer a full physical and psychological evaluation, including x-rays, MRI scans, and a full dental check-up."

Faultline stopped fidgeting and moved to sit back down on her cardboard box. I waited for her to get comfortable before I continued.

"Fifteen months ago, Ms. Bergman was assigned to treat a Case 53 parahuman, code name Sanguine. Sanguine was in good health. Human-normal, beyond their cosmetic alterations. However Sanguine reported dental pain, and on investigation it was discovered he was fitted with an orthodontic implant. It hadn't been adjusted to the correct schedule, and was painfully out of alignment."

"So you're saying had braces," she said.

"Of a sort. The style and manufacture of his braces were unlike anything in use anywhere else. At least," I paused and leaned forward, "not anywhere on this planet."

"God dammit, Question," Faultline said, standing up.

I dove to the side and started rummaging through a cardboard box at the side of my desk. It took a few seconds, but I found what I needed.

I slid the x-ray plate across the desk towards the woman. "The implant shows every sign of being mass produced, there's even a brand mark and serial number, but you won't find anything like them in any orthodontist's catalog."

Faultline snatched up the x-ray, looking at it dubiously, as if she knew what to look for. "It could just be something obscure," she said. "Something from a small country, or something obsolete."

I shook my head. "If anything it's more advanced than our planet's dentistry. It shows evidence of a kind of tooling that we're only just developing for commercial use."

Faultline looked down at the x-ray, quiet now. "This could be government work, something exclusive."

I shrugged and leaned back in my chair. "It's a possibility."

"Well what's your theory? Alien orthodontists?"

"No. The aliens wouldn't have any interest in cosmetic dentistry. Unless-" I paused, my mind racing. I pulled out a yellow pad and began scribbling notes. "Unless they were preparing someone for a public-facing role. Spokesperson. Figurehead. President?"

"Question. Question! Focus!" Faultline clapped a pair of forge gloves together, bringing my attention back to her. "Is that everything? A Case 53 turned up with weird dental work?"

I shook my head slowly. "That copy of the x-ray is the last one in existence. A week after Sanguine was cleared by the medical team, a computer virus, reportedly released by an anti-cape hate group, wiped the headquarters' medical records. It purged all of their digital files along with that month's backups. Ms. Bergman was quietly dismissed. If she hadn't kept the physical plate and her notes, there'd be no evidence at all."

"A computer virus making it into a PRT computer system? That's weird," Faultline said.

"Suspicious," I corrected. "Indicative."

She rolled up the plastic sheet of the x-ray and slid it into an inner pocket of her coat. "It's a lead, I guess. This Bergman, will she talk?"

I spread my hands. "She spoke to me. She had a desire to see the truth told. Are we square?"

"We're square," Faultline said, slipping the index card into a deep pocket.

"Any more requests?" I asked.

"Just the usual. If you happen across any Case-53s who've slipped the PRT net-"

"I'll keep my eyes open," I said.

Faultline turned and started picking her way back to the flimsy wooden door.

"Actually, there's one more thing," I said.

Faultline stopped and turned. "Yeah?"

"I'm considering seeking out a consultant on this."

Faultline's eyebrows rose, visible as dark ridges behind the plastic of her visor. "Oh? You're finally starting to realize you're in over your head?"

"Hardly. But somehow all of this managed to get by all the Thinkers and Tinkers and data analysts the government has watching over our shoulders," I gestured at the government. "I need to know if that's because of corruption, or if it hits one of your blind spots."

" _My_ blind spots?"

"Parahumans," I clarified, then waved a hand dismissively. "Don't worry about it. I just need a Thinker consult. Know anyone in town with reasonable rates? Preferably someone without gang affiliations."

Faultline's eyes narrowed. "There's one."

"Name?"

"Tattletale," she said.

"I like her already."

"That'll change," Faultline said.

"Got her real name?" I asked.

Faultline snorted. "You know better than that."

"So how am I going to contact her? Does she have a business number?"

"People don't contact her, they suffer her."

"Fine," I said, pulling my notepad towards me and unlocking the drawer that held my computer. "I'll handle it. Thanks for the hook up."

Faultline turned the doorknob, and the door drifted open in her hands. "Yeah. You're welcome," she said, and left.

I lifted the lid of the computer and got to work. It might take a few days to track her down, but there were some turns you just couldn't skip on the road to the truth.


	2. Chapter 2

I finally caught up with her in an alley behind the Lord Street Market. It had taken almost four days to track her down. Tattletale and her group weren't overly active or ostentatious, but luckily for me they weren't overly paranoid either.

They used the same vehicles for cape and civilian transport. They met with costumed figures while they were in civilian dress. The girl was a big spender in small tourist stores, which people tended to remember even in this city.

It wasn't so much like looking for a needle in a haystack, as a needle in a bag of sand. Not difficult to feel out, provided you were willing to risk your skin.

The girl was in her late teens, just a kid. She looked kind of small out of costume and loaded down with bags from the market. I knew from my surveillance that she had a grin she showed the world like a puppy baring its teeth. Luckily for me this one was all bark, no bite.

"Lisa."

The girl stopped and turned. She sized me up, spent a long time looking at my mask. Some people get uneasy at the sight of a smooth, featureless face, but Lisa wasn't one of them. She was assessing me, I could almost see the fireworks going off behind her eyes.

"It is Lisa, isn't it?" I asked.

"Yeah? What do you want?"

That cocky toss of her head. Either she'd already somehow worked out what this was, or she had guts of cast iron.

"I'm looking for some information," I said. "Heard you might be the one to ask."

"Someone told you to talk to me?"

"Someone told me to talk to a tattletale."

Her eyes widened, just a little. They didn't like it when you knew who they were, when you knew what was behind the mask. Surprising, given how little care so many of them take with that particular secret.

Did anyone really think a thin strip of fabric could actually hide anything? I was no artist, and even I'd been able to fill in the blanks behind Tattletale's domino mask with a pencil and a lighting reference. Someone with a surplus of resources could track down private identities without much trouble at all. Nobody did it. Nobody even suggested it. It was the kind of idea that got you demoted and ostracized.

I knew I'd played with fire by making that connection in front of her, that I could be putting myself in danger for knowing too much, but I was no stranger to that. All the fragments I'd pieced together told me she was a professional, or at least that she put on a good act, and I needed to get her attention.

I could see her muscles tense as she processed what I'd said. It looked like it was fight or flight time, but this girl didn't have the edge on me in either. I mentally prepared myself to chase her, there was no way she could get away from me on foot. Just as I thought she was about to bolt, the tension went out of her and she fixed me with a disgusted stare.

I'd approached her wearing my mask. Not a costume - just a simple precaution against casual identification. Important when your business is exposing the crimes of powerful people. Maybe it was hypocritical to hide my identity while using hers to make contact, but it wasn't my fault 'Tattletale' wasn't in the phone book.

"Shit, keep your voice down. Not here."

"Then where?" I asked. "I'm not dressed for a tea party."

She'd want to get me somewhere public, maybe even somewhere she could call the PRT. Independents like me thrived in the gray area, but I was on the suspect roster for too many break-ins and data intrusions for them to take my word over hers, not if someone called me out for harassing a 'civilian'.

"You know the coffee shop on the north end of the boardwalk?"

"Masks would get too much attention," I said. That whole strip was packed with cape tourists every day of the week. "I thought you'd want to keep this out of the public sphere."

"I meant out of costume," she said, like she was talking to an idiot.

"Nice try," I said. "No."

She turned to walk away. "Fine."

I took a step after her. I let my foot scrape against the ground as I moved, to let her hear me, to let her know I wouldn't just let her just walk away without hearing me out. She rounded on me.

"Shit, you don't even know about the unwritten rules."

"I know them," I said. "They don't apply to me."

"You're not a cape," she said, light dawning in her eyes. "Well, okay, you're a cape. You're not a parahuman."

"Bingo."

"You're just an ordinary guy. No, not totally ordinary. Martial arts training. History in law enforcement? The PRT? Discharged on health grounds. Mental illness, right? Paranoid schizophrenia?"

"Only if you believe my discharge papers."

"Fuck. You're not a cape, you're just a nut."

I smiled behind my mask. "I heard you were a smart cookie."

She sighed and I saw her relax. She thought this was over. Typical 'para' attitude. Just because I didn't slot into her world-view of enhanced humans and undifferentiated government antagonists, I was suddenly beneath her. She wasn't the first person to discount me just because I wasn't a threat.

"Listen, you're walking blind into dangerous territory," she said. Her voice was gentle, kind. "In respect to your condition, I'm gonna let it slide today. But the people I work with, the people I work for? They're not all the live-and-let-live type. Get it? If they figure out you've been harassing me, they'll come after you. If my boss finds out you know who I am -and he might already know- he'll kill you."

"Gee, I've never been threatened before."

She spent a few more seconds scrutinizing me. What was going on in that head?

"You live in a rat's hole of an apartment on the edge of the trainyard, because those tenements are the only places that'll have someone with no references and no history," she began.

I could hear venom in her voice now. This must have been why Faultline had been so touchy about her. If I'd been anyone else I might have got my feelings hurt.

"You can barely afford to eat after paying rent on your shitty box-room office, and despite having no money, no friends, no job, and no powers, you're still trying to mess around with capes. What you're doing would be suicidal for an independent _cape_. Doing it as a regular, powerless guy is beyond a death wish."

I interrupted her. "Question - did you get all that just from looking at me?"

I was impressed. If this girl weren't throwing around so much stolen cash, I might be offering her a job.

"I'm psychic," she said. There it was. That vulpine smile.

"If that were true, you'd be screaming by now."

The smile was still there, but it no longer reached her eyes.

"You look down on me because you think I'm powerless," I said, "but I don't accept that people are powerless just because nobody gave them a magic gun. Anyone can make a difference. Anyone can make ripples, if they thrash hard enough."

I had to deal with the para world view a lot in my line of work. Most of the time I could deal with it, but sometimes it grated.

I sighed. "You work things out, am I right? You make connections. You have some kind of super-detective power. My build, my accent, my vocabulary, my smell. It's all you need to build up a total history of me. Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains must be the truth."

Her silence was answer enough.

"Then listen to this. I've only got a couple of questions, there might even be a job in it for you, and all you have to do is hear me out. But if you keep trying to dance around me, I'm going to start talking, and then you'll work out a few things you'll wish you didn't know."

"Sorry," she said. The grin was back in full force. "You just ran out of time. Remember those people I told you about?"

Ah. She'd been stalling the whole time. The whole frightened-puppy ready-to-bolt routine had been an act. I spun on the spot, looking around. I couldn't see anyone, but that didn't mean much where capes were involved. I felt something on my leg and looked down.

Cockroaches, crawling up my pants legs. Well, that was fine. I lived with roaches, they were like pets to me. A swarm of flies began spilling from a nearby dumpster, buzzing round me in a thick black cloud. It looked like I'd drawn the wrath of some kind of bug man.

"I'm not here to fight," I said, holding up my hands at the bugs. "I need information. There's something rotten going on in city hall. I think Lisa can help."

The flies stopped in mid air, hanging still. Ah. I had someone's interest. Someone was listening.

"I think someone's setting this city up for a fall," I continued. "I need to find out who, before they make their move. If the gangs end up going head to head, it's going to be bad for everybody. Undersiders included."

The flies withdrew to mask the entrance of a girl. Tall, skinny, coming around the corner behind Lisa. She was wearing a dark hoodie, baggy enough to hide any number of concealed weapons, and was wearing some kind of gray-black mask with yellow plastic eyes.

"Shit," Lisa said, pressing a hand to her head. "He's right."

I pressed my point.

"Question - why in the fall of 2009 did the city remove all greenery from the south Docks and Trainyard residential zones, when Parks were over budget for that year?

"Question - why were the commercial strips zoned out of the residential clusters all along the west side of the city, south of Captain's Hill, only to be left derelict for two years?

"Question - why is eighty percent of the city's schools budget directed into Arcadia, leaving Winslow and Clarendon to decay into crumbling abattoirs for the mind?"

I looked at the two girls. The bug girl seemed interested, and Lisa was holding her head. She got it. I thought I might as well spell it out.

"Damaging public areas, cutting and education and outreach programs, creating ghost towns out of poor districts. These actions were all taken to actively promote gang crime. Someone's turned Brockton Bay into a machine, churning out a steady stream of dispossessed and desperate recruits for the gangs, while strangling the economy enough to put them at each others' throats and creating derelict zones for them to operate in. Social engineering on a city-wide scale. Each movement is subtle, but the pattern is undeniable."

"That's just the tip of the iceberg," I said. "Someone's pouring gasoline into the Bay, and I want to know who before they toss the match. All I need is five minutes of your time, Lisa. To show you some documents, and ask a few questions."

"No way," Lisa said forcefully, then turned to the masked girl. "Take him down already."

The girl in the hoodie turned to her. "But-"

"He's just a psycho. He won't let us leave, you've got to take him down."

I took a step forward. "When I first heard of your group, I couldn't decide if you were the Undersiders, or the Un-deciders. Both seemed to apply." A buzzing passed closed to my ear, and I resisted the urge to twitch. "You've been staying at the edges. Small jobs. Never getting involved with the gangs or drawing the attention of the police. You've been neutral so far, but you can't stay neutral."

The cloud of flies around me was steadily growing. I held up my hands and stayed my ground. "This is where you decide. If you want to leave, I can't do anything to stop you. But if you want to help, it will only take you a few minutes, and I can pay you back in return."

Lisa tossed her head again, and put a gentle hand on the bug girl's arm. They exchanged a look, some silent communication passed between them, and they turned their backs on me and started walking away. My last sight of Lisa was of her disappearing around the corner, into the crowds of the market.

I sighed. I'd played my hand, she'd played hers, and hers was better. I didn't know what bugs could do to me, but I was willing to bet finding out would be unpleasant. Even if I'd had any defense against them, there was no way I could force Tattletale to help me.

I turned and stalked away, back into the crowds flooding out of the mall. One on one, a guy with a blank face stood out, he was alarming. But in a crowd? He blended in better than you could imagine.

* * *

 _AN: The effects of mental illness are bad enough without also having to suffer the kind of ignorance and prejudice Tattletale demonstrated in this chapter. I wrote her dialog, but I don't condone it. Being offensive, acerbic, and taking problematic cheap shots is an unfortunate and unavoidable part of her character._


	3. Chapter 3

The Tattletale angle was a bust. Faultline had implied she was a free agent, maybe even the leader of her gang, but the girl had disproved that theory when she'd mentioned her boss.

I didn't know if it had been a genuine slip, or if she was playing me. For all I knew she'd designed the whole conversation to steer me in the direction I was going now, but I couldn't afford to start second guessing myself. If I really was that deeply tangled in her web, then I was trapped no matter what I did.

There was something else, something nagging at me. I'd seen something in her eyes when I'd mentioned the game being run in the mayor's office. There'd been a spark of recognition, even fear. At first I thought she'd just been afraid for herself, her position. Later I'd started to wonder about it. Could she have made a connection that I'd missed? A realization that terrified her? She might even have guessed who was behind the state of the city. Who could it have been? What thread had she followed? Where had it led?

It could have been one of the gangs. The Empire Eighty Eight was the local neo-Nazi chapter. They definitely had the government connections, funding, and discipline needed to pull something like this off, but I couldn't see my way through to their motive. All out war between the Merchants, Empire and ABB would do irreparable harm to all of them.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the Empire were sitting on a secret weapon, someone who could stand up to anyone, even Lung. But if that was it why not go for a preemptive strike? Why the long game? That wasn't the Empire's style. I was looking for a lower-case-t thinker, someone who liked to play chess with people's lives.

There was only one other group in the city whose roots ran deep enough to manage a manipulation this long and this complex. A hive of inefficiency, bureaucracy, and pandering stuffed suits led by a woman who might just be bloody-minded enough to try something like this. I'd never had her pegged as a puppet-master, but getting all of your enemies to fight each other spoke of a pragmatic, mechanical mind. I swore I'd never come back, but this particular mountain wouldn't come to Muhammad.

I walked up to the front desk, drawing stares and making the guards edgy. The tourists in the lobby were shooting me glances, they probably thought I was a cape. The foam turrets were tracking me, probably thought I was a threat. The receptionist was staring at me with perfect professionalism, she probably thought I was a hero. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Hello," I said, smiling through the false-skin of my mask. "I'd like to speak with Director Piggot."

The woman kept her calm admirably, and fixed me with an emotionless, almost robotic smile. "And who should I say wants an appointment?"

"That's The Question," I said. I suppressed a smile at the joke. It was self indulgent, my little vice.

Her expression wavered then, confusion. I didn't speak, it wasn't in my interests to over-sell my position.

"I see. Well, Please take a seat," she said politely.

I politely acquiesced. The waiting area was off to the side of the lobby, with plastic chairs and a table covered in glossy magazines. I picked one up, it had a picture of Armsmaster on the front cover, and an itinerary of PRT speaking events on the back. I started to slowly flip through it.

"Are you a hero!?"

I turned to look. A little boy was sitting next to me, maybe eleven or twelve.

"No," I said. "Just someone who asks a lot of questions."

"Like what?" He asked, spinning on his chair to face me, cross-legged.

I looked around for his mother, who was absent. Children his age shouldn't be left alone. I sighed.

"Like why the PRT looks more like a public relations operation than a crime-fighting body," I said, idly scanning the waiting area for microphones. "Like why a fifth of the personnel in this building have media or marketing degrees, and no police qualifications. Like why, in four years of serious parahuman gang violence, nobody in this building has made any move on the villains' civilian identities, or pursued any of their purely human criminal interests."

"Ooh," the boy said. The kid's eyes roved desperately to the magazine in my hand. "Armsmaster's my favorite hero!"

I flipped back to the cover and looked down at the glossy photo. "Did you ever wonder why his helmet leaves his mouth unprotected?"

The boy shook his head.

"Theory - his teeth have been replaced with micro-electronics in an attempt to read human thoughts. Possibility - the technology uses his mouth as a resonance chamber to detect and amplify sub-vocalizations."

"Cool!"

A man cleared his throat to my left. "Actually, it's to make me look less intimidating to the public."

Armsmaster. He'd arrived so quickly he must already have been in the building. There was no way that I'd rate a visit from the local Protectorate head otherwise. I stood to face the hero, silently forming words in the back of my throat.

 _[That might work on them. I know the truth.]_

Armsmaster did nothing to give away his unique sensory equipment. I'd have to consider that theory unconfirmed, until I had better evidence.

"Good to meet you," he said insincerely. "I'm Armsmaster. I got a call that a new cape showed up and asked to speak with the director. Protocol for prospective Heroes is to speak with a Protectorate representative. As a Protectorate parahuman, you'd fall under my area of responsibility."

"That's not why I'm here," I said. "I just need to ask the director some questions, face to face."

"An interview?" he asked slowly. "Are you a journalist? Who are you working for?"

I shook my head. "No one. I'm investigating a crime. One that I believe the director might be involved in, or is tacitly allowing to continue."

Armsmaster stared at me for a moment. "You're telling the truth."

 _[Always.]_

Armsmaster inhaled once, slowly, and took a moment to compose himself. "The director's busy. If you're willing, you and I can talk for a few minutes."

I nodded. I rolled the magazine up and pocketed it. I'd come for the director, I wanted to look her in the eye when I asked the question, but that didn't look like it was on the cards. The local Protectorate leader was good enough as a runner-up prize. There were questions I'd been saving for him as well.

Armsmaster turned and started to lead me towards the elevator. He'd be leading me to where I knew the second-floor interview rooms were situated. Moderate security. Comfortable. Usually reserved for informants and witnesses. He strode ahead and hit the button for the elevator.

"Wait," I said, stopping. "You need to find someone to look after the kid."

Armsmaster turned and tilted his head to look behind me. "What kid?"

I turned. The waiting area was empty.

"My mistake. His mother must have found him. Lead on."

The elevator seemed to give a shrill, ear-piercing whine, announcing its arrival, and we stepped inside. After only a moment in the elevator, Armsmaster led me back out and down a narrow corridor, and into one of the small, cold rooms.

The interrogation rooms had a unique, unforgettable smell. Some faint combination of vending machine coffee and ammonia from the concealed containment foam capsules that were planted just behind the plaster of the walls and ceiling.

Being back in the cramped room was like being thrown back in time, and I could almost feel the lock engage as the door closed. It felt different now that I was on the other side of the table. I couldn't avoid imagining the unmanageable weight of stupidity pressing down on me from the floors above. I felt a shudder at the thought of being at the mercy of a building full of bureaucrats.

"All right," Armsmaster said, settling back into the steel chair. "Start from the beginning. Tell me what you think you know."

"You're not ready for what I know. But I _will_ tell you about the house of cards being built on Captain's Hill."

I laid it out for him. I told him about the report from the mayor's office, though not how I got it. I showed him copies of my documentation. I told him about my informant in the police administration, and what I'd pieced together from funding changes over the last three years.

I showed him the patterns of money being diverted away from outreach programs and urban renewal, and towards giving law enforcement bigger guns, and more recruits, how an increasing percentage of their staff were drawn from the ex-military veteran pools. More firepower, on both sides. More escalation. More powder in the keg.

I laid bare the web of money that led from corporate special interests, through municipal offices, and into the hands of city officials. I showed him how these payments preceded the cancellation of handgun hand-in amnesties, the closure of drug rehabilitation centers, and a host of other tiny wounds to the city's regeneration.

I gave him everything he needed to paint a picture of a city dying the death of a thousand cuts, though not enough to see who was holding the knife.

"Okay," he said, finally, after I'd finished my explanation. He spent a moment looking across the fan of papers, photos and documents I'd spread in front of him, no doubt digitally scanning and cataloging it. "Do you mind talking about the nature of your powers?"

"My powers." I said.

"Your parahuman abilities."

"Doesn't the evidence stand on its own?" I asked, pulling a particularly damning bank statement from the pile, an account belonging to the school board assistant secretary. "Are you suggesting that you won't even consider these facts unless I came to these conclusions using a super-power?"

"Honestly, I'm not sure what I'm looking at here," Armsmaster said, sitting back in the steel chair. "The provenance of these documents is questionable, and there's no chain of custody on them. And the story you're giving me-"

"Facts. I'm giving you facts. Verifiable," I said, tapping the papers with a gloved finger. "I've given you enough to launch an investigation at the very least. What's stopping you? Is there already a blanket ban on investigating city corruption? Has someone coached you on this case ahead of time? Has someone preemptively tried to discredit me?"

"No, all I'm saying is when I look at this, I don't see what you see," Armsmaster said, his voice soft, conspiratorial. "It would make things easier, politically and legally, if you demonstrated your powers to my satisfaction."

This was Conflict Resolution 101. Listen. Acknowledge. Control your tone. Dual concern. I was impressed. I wouldn't have thought Armsmaster was capable of anything approaching diplomacy. He always struck me as aloof, impatient, arrogant. He must have been getting special training, de-escalation, public speaking, psychic self-defense.

Maybe I was wrong, maybe he'd always been a smooth talker in person. But if not, then why was he suddenly acting like he'd been trained for it?

Could Piggot be assigning social training in anticipation of a public-relations challenge? Was she planning something she knew would blow up in the press? Or was it something in the past, a recent failure, something that demanded additional training, punishment. Question for later.

"My powers," I said, thinking. "I have the power of rational thought. It allows me to perceive connections between isolated pieces of information."

Armsmaster nodded. "Can you give an example?"

He wanted me to perform. Information wasn't enough. Proof wasn't enough. He'd only accept truth from someone in his class, a peer, a cape. Power had always been concentrated at the top. In past ages the price for entry into that group had been intelligence, ruthlessness, or money. Now there was a new gate, and a new key. To exert power, you needed powers.

"In the lobby, you told me I was telling the truth."

Armsmaster nodded.

"It was a statement, a declaration," I said. "Supposition — you have a lie detector installed in your suit. You're proud of it, you wanted to show it off. It's new, or it was difficult to make."

Armsmaster nodded slowly. "Yes. But that doesn't seem beyond what an ordinary human could deduce. I thought you had some kind of Thinker ability?"

"I think best by asking questions," I said. "Question — why is a lie detector useful to a man whose role doesn't routinely involve the interrogation of criminals? Question — what use is a lie detector whose output is sure to be inadmissible in court? Question — exactly whose lies are you trying to detect?"

Armsmaster shifted in his seat.

"Answer — you think your superiors are lying to you. Interesting."

Armsmaster didn't say anything.

"Theory — you know Piggot has secrets. You might even suspect that there are sinister forces moving within the Protectorate. You've seen the shadows they cast, you've found their fingerprints, and you feel alone and afraid. You don't know who to trust, and so you trust no one you aren't sure is telling you the truth."

"Okay." Armsmaster cleared his throat. "I'll put you down in our records as a provisional Thinker 2, under the name 'Question'."

"What about Piggot?" I asked.

"I'll talk to her."

"About her involvement? Or about me?"

"Look, you can leave this with me," Armsmaster said. "I'll look it over with an open mind. If there are questions to be asked, I'll ask them."

"Fine," I said. "You can keep the papers. I have copies. They're with a friend, set to be sent to the press if anything happens to me."

"Uh, fine," Armsmaster said, and began sorting and stacking the papers.

I watched him shuffle for a moment, wondering how his steel fingers found purchase on the paper. "Satisfy my curiosity about something."

"Hm?"

"You're close with Miss Militia," I said. That much was part of his public profile.

"We work together," Armsmaster said, looking up momentarily. "Why?"

I decided to risk the question. "What does she dream about?"

Armsmaster put down the stack of high-speed stock market transactions and looked at me. "You're a fan?"

"Irrelevant," I said. I neglected to mention that I _was_ a fan. "I'm talking about an event two months after she enrolled in the Wards program. Miss Militia took part in an interview for the July edition of 'Heroes' magazine."

Armsmaster seemed interested, and I continued. "Of the twenty three questions asked during the interview, only twenty two made it into the published article. The dropped question was a follow-up to her status as a 'noctis', a parahuman who no longer needs to sleep. The excised question was, 'What do you dream about?'"

"How do you know, if it was cut?" Armsmaster asked, stacking up papers, obviously preparing to leave. "Maybe she just didn't want to say."

"Maybe," I said. My tone said what I thought about that possibility. "Either way, I'd like to know the answer."

"I don't plan on giving out personal details about my colleagues." Armsmaster stood and held out his hand for me to shake.

It seemed like Armsmaster had decided the interview was over. I looked down at his offered hand for a second. More evidence of sensitivity training? I gripped it, and he brought his left hand down to clasp my wrist in an extended politician's shake.

"I have more questions," I said as we separated.

"I'm sorry, I don't have time."

I stood and followed him to the door. Something inside me uncoiled when I heard the lock open, and felt the cool, clean air of the corridor wash in. I paused as we passed out of the room.

"There's one more thing," I said.

He hummed. "What?"

"You should keep close watch on the receptionist," I said. "I think she may be a robot."

He looked up. "A robot?"

"A tinker-tech humanoid replicant," I confided. "They walk among us."

Armsmaster's expression twisted into concern.

"Don't worry," I added. "There are only a few of them. For now."

"I'll bear that in mind. How can we contact you?"

I pulled a crumpled card from my coat pocket and passed it to him. "Leave a message for me here. Don't bother trying to trace it. A tinker friend set it up."

He took the card and looked down at it. "This is blank."

I ignored him as I made my way to the elevator. I knew my way out.

I'd hardly got anything from Armsmaster, and nothing I needed. I had a list of questions for the Protectorate a mile long, but it hadn't been the place, and there hadn't been any time.

I'd planted the seeds of truth, and that would have to be enough for now. I didn't know how far I could rely on Armsmaster to follow the leads I'd given him, but he at least seemed to operate with the necessary skepticism, and I thought I could trust him to keep his word.

I went back over our conversation as I stepped out onto the street. There was one thing he'd given me. An answer I hadn't even had a question for. The lie detector. He'd as much as admitted someone in the law enforcement hierarchy was lying to him.

But Armsmaster was a regional leader, there were only so many people who were above him. If he thought he was being lied to from above, then it could only be Piggot.

Unless it went higher, someone else in the tree. The mayor? The governor? Or higher still? PRT Director Rebecca Costa-Brown? Legend? The triumvirate? The president? Or _them_. Could Armsmaster have a direct line to _them_? A question for later. For now I had other leads. Local leads.

And unless I'd missed my guess, the five heavy-set men in black fatigues leaning out of a van in front of me were one of them.

"It's him."

Before I had time to react, I was being seized by a several sets of strong arms.

* * *

AN: To all the people who've left reviews, thank you for the kind words! I'm totally dependant on you to know which stories are worth pursuing, so I'm grateful to everyone who takes the time to read and hits follow or review.


	4. Chapter 4

The fist hit my face like shovel being driven into the ground. The pain was intense, and the weight of it was disabling all on its own. My head rocked back the world transformed into a noisy blur.

I took a step backwards, but a pair of strong arms shot out from the van and grabbed onto my coat. I felt a rushing sensation, and I was lifted off the street and pulled head first into the van. The door slammed shut, and the sunlight disappeared.

"Bold move," I said. My voice was a slurred mess. I reached up to place a hand against my mask, trying to discern the fate of my nose. It wasn't even bleeding. "A street grab, less than a hundred yards from-"

A needle-sharp pain appeared on the left side of my chest, and a second later I felt the tearing sensation of electricity shooting through my body. My stomach and chest twisted into a knot, and I doubled over on the floor, dry heaving.

One of the figures stepped forward and checked my coat pockets one by one. My left pocket gave up a disposable instant camera and a flashlight. The right yielded a bump key and a set of lock picks. He reached into the inside pocket of my coat and pulled out a few creased business cards, as well as a folded sheet of paper. He dropped them all into a zip-lock bag and sealed it.

He bent towards me and I felt rough fingers against my throat, roaming, searching. He was trying to find the edge of my mask. Idiot. He gave up trying to find the seam and tried pulling on the material instead. I grunted as the adhesive keeping it in place transferred the movement to my skin.

"It won't come off. What's this shit made of."

"It's called psuedoderm," I muttered. "A gift from a friend-"

More current lanced through my body, and I slumped back onto the floor.

"Just work around it," a rough voice shouted from the driver's cab.

The man above me pulled a roll of duck tape and started winding it around my head, covering my mouth and then my eyes. I could still breathe through my nose, but the tape was tight enough around the fabric of my mask that making noise would be difficult, and the translucent material of my mask above my eyes became near total darkness.

"Wasn't this supposed to be some kinda cape?"

"No talking."

"He didn't even put up a fight."

"Follow procedure, and shut your mouth."

They were quiet after that. All I could hear was the whine of the engine as it accelerated, and the hissing of breaks at corners and stoplights.

The distribution of turns told me we were still somewhere in the city. I didn't feel the long straight lines that would have had us heading out of the city on the freeway, but Brockton had plenty of irregular corners, and I lost track of our location after only a few minutes.

I was glad of the quiet on the ride. It gave me time to order my thoughts, and it told me something about the people who'd taken me.

Any disorganized gang could have shown up in black body suits, but their silence, and the way they enforced my silence, told me I was dealing with professionals. I guessed they were probably following strict anti-cape procedures, a private-sector variant on the PRT's own Master-Stranger protocols.

The timing of this kidnapping couldn't have been a coincidence. It was less than a day since I'd contacted tattletale, and now somebody was going to extraordinary lengths to meet me. Either the girl was being watched by a third party, or I was going to meet Lisa's mysterious employer.

I had to wonder, had Tattletale set me on this collision course deliberately? Why would she let the existence of her boss slip at all, if not to leave me with information that would catch his attention? Could it really be a simple error? Could a parahuman like her even make that kind of error?

We traveled for around thirty minutes, then I felt a series of drops and turns as we descended into what I assumed was an underground parking lot.

The doors opened, and I was hauled roughly out. The next twenty minutes were spent stumbling blindly over steel floors, down wide corridors. Whatever this building was, it was big, and the humidity was different enough to the street that I guessed it was climate-controlled.

We passed people as we walked. Large bodies moving around on too-quiet feet. They smelled strongly of sweat and the same cheap laundry cleaner. Homogeneous smells for homogeneous people. I made an educated guess about their profession.

An underground, climate-controlled, steel-floored base, populated by mercenaries and other unscrupulous employees. Whoever had taken me had serious resources.

Eventually I was brought into what sounded like a small room, about the size of a walk-in closet, and I was thrown roughly onto a steel chair.

I felt pressure against my wrists. A second later, someone was ripping the tape from around my arms, followed by the tape wound around my head. I winced as my mask pulled at my skin, but I didn't make a sound.

Suddenly I could see again, though there wasn't a lot to look at. I was in a small space, taller than it was wide. The walls were gray plaster, and I was facing a steel door, still open. The figure who'd removed the tape pulled a pair of handcuffs from somewhere, and cuffed my hands together, with the chain looped through the arm of the chair.

Between me and the door stood a figure. He was tall, easily six feet, and almost impossibly thin. He was dressed in a black bodysuit that covered his entire body, even his face. The only decoration on the suit was the image of a white snake, winding up around his body to where it terminated, the face of the snake hanging down over his head.

There was only one reason to uncover my eyes for the kind of conversation this man was planning. He was a performance artist. He wanted me to see him. There was a justification, I was sure — something involving the power of intimidation, or brand recognition, but the real reason was vanity. This was a vain man.

One of the goons in black bodysuits stepped over to me carrying a steel case. He knelt by my chair, and from the corner of my eye I saw him withdraw a syringe, already loaded with a clear fluid. I saw him searching for an artery in my neck, and I tried to move away, but a rough hand grabbed my hair and held me in place.

"Sodium pentathol?" I asked, gritting my teeth as I felt the needle pierce skin.

"Something like that," the tall figure said. "Something a little more modern."

The goon withdrew from the room, and the man in the snake-suit stood there for a minute, staring down at me. He barely moved as he waited, not even to shift his weight from foot to foot. He had the posture of someone who did a lot of standing, pacing, striding. He looked like a man who strode.

I tried to push through my fading lucidity to try and join some dots together. There had been rumors for months of a new player in town. He was said to hold a small area of territory downtown, which he defended from the other gangs, but otherwise seemed to leave to its own devices.

He was rarely seen in public, operating almost exclusively through mercenaries. Depending on who you asked, he was either an ordinary person using his personal fortune to clean up the city, or a parahuman mastermind, whose power and skill were so great that his real operations were completely invisible.

The only constant was the name he used, and seeing the white snake slithering around his outfit, I could see how it applied.

"You're Coil," I said.

"Naturally."

I couldn't imagine why he was questioning me himself, at least until I remembered the vanity. One of the first things we learned at the PRT was that interrogations could go both ways. Ask the wrong question of a Thinker type, and you could give away more than you learned.

I didn't have a superpower backing me up, but that was likely the only reason he was being so sloppy as to interrogate me in person.

"You've taken me prisoner because I was getting too close to something," I said.

Coil was silent for a moment, then said, "I've invited you here, because you've been spending your time harassing my associates."

I opened my mouth to speak, but a wave of nausea ran through me. My head swam with a narcotic bloom, giddy confusion. I wondered what would happen if I threw up while wearing my mask.

"It will only take a few more seconds for the substance to take effect, then we can talk."

Coil stepped fully into the narrow room, and closed the door behind him. With the door closed, the only light in the room came from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It cast a harsh white light that seemed to be absorbed completely by Coil's body suit, reflecting only from the white marks.

Somewhere between florescent fabric and drug-induced hallucinations, I began to have the impression I was speaking to a giant snake.

"I've been looking into you. What do you call yourself, The Question?"

I grunted. One thought blurred into the next. It was a struggle to remember why I was even resisting. He was such a polite snake.

"Speak up."

"Yes."

"Excellent," Coil said, clasping his hands together. "Well, it seems you've been asking rather a lot of them recently — of my subordinate Tattletale, the Protectorate, reporters, independent parahumans, the list goes on."

"So Tattletale really is your subordinate," I said, pouncing on the admission.

"I think that much was clear," Coil said, shifting his hands behind his back. "I'd be interested to hear what it is you think you've learned."

I bit down on my lip hard, harder than I'd intended. The wave of pain and the coppery taste of blood helped cut through the fog that was drifting across my thoughts.

I knew my body could process a safe dose of sodium pentathol in a little over an hour, but I hadn't kept up with the pharmacology of interrogations. With modern, or even tinker-created drugs, nothing was beyond reason. I should have kept up with the literature. I'd been sloppy.

Coil leaned over, the snake descending directly into my field of view, its deep black eyes staring into me, hypnotizing. "Tell me what you know."

I searched my thoughts about the recent investigation. I wanted to tell him everything. I was expository by nature —a weakness I would have been foolish to ignore— and this was playing in my innate desire to reveal the truth. This was one of the few cases where a frank answer wasn't the best course.

"You have a history working in a corporate environment, a bureaucracy," I said, eventually. I was giving him something, anything, to relieve the pressure to submit.

Coil pulled back. "You discovered this during your investigation?"

"Just now," I said. My head swam. "You have boardroom body language. Reminds me of- pointless middle managers."

Coil leaned down and pressed his hands against the arm rests of my chair. His knuckles creaked as he squeezed the metal. "I don't want your idle speculation. I want to hear what you _know_."

My neck muscles felt weak. My head rolled back against the chair, and I took a breath to speak. There was lots I knew. Some of it might even be of interest to a mastermind. I spent long seconds dredging up secrets that weren't exactly the ones he wanted.

"The information portal to Aleph is an elaborate fiction," I said, "designed to market sub-par media to a mass audience."

"No," Coil said. His tone was low, and there was a warning in it. He leaned closer. I could almost feel his breath, almost hear the hiss of his forked tongue. "Not theories. Tell me what you've discovered about my organization, about my plans. If I have leaks or weaknesses, I need to find them before- anyone else."

It was getting harder to resist. Everything was blurry, dreamlike. The concrete world seemed like a distant place. Here, everything was fluid, what did it even matter what I said?

"The government _did_ put a man on the moon in '69," I said, my voice little more than a hiss by that point. "It was the only place he could be safely contained."

"No," Coil snapped. He started moving, as if he wanted to pace, but in the small room all he could do was turn on the spot. It was a little ridiculous. "I don't want to hear about Earth Aleph, or my body language, or aglets! I want to hear what all of your digging into my affairs has got you. Why did you arrange a theft from the city hall? What did you learn at the PRT building?"

Something about that comment pricked my distant mind. What had he said? Aglets. The conspiracy surrounding aglets was as deep as it was sinister, but it was something that only I was aware of. It wasn't something I'd ever told the man in front of me.

Coil withdrew and turned to face the door, collecting himself. The weight of my confusion began to drift away, swept upwards by the delirious haze. He turned back towards me.

"Let's try something easier." He stepped behind my chair, and I heard rustling, the clatter of something plastic. When he stepped back into my field of view he was holding a plastic tray with the equipment his thugs had taken from me. He plucked out a blank white card. "What are these?"

"Business cards." I said.

"Good."

He tossed the card back into the tray, and pulled out a larger sheet of paper. He unfolded it, then held it up for me. The crayon drawing was crude, abstract. Two lines, endlessly intertwined, firing sparks in every direction as they spiraled towards a green dot.

"And this?" he asked.

"A child's drawing."

He glanced at it. "Your own child?"

From somewhere below us in the base came a prolonged scream of tortured metal. Coil didn't even twitch. Whatever it was must have been business as usual to him.

"I don't have any children," I said. "It was drawn by a young parahuman in Nebraska."

He tossed the sheet back into the tray. "Why do you carry it?"

I waited a second, then asked, "Come again?"

"Why do you carry that particular drawing? What does it have to do with you?"

"Interesting," I said, as my head rolled back against the chair.

He turned then, folded his hands behind his back, and began pacing around the small room. He was suddenly calm. All of his agitation of moments before had drained away. At first I assumed he was thinking, but after five minutes, I guessed he was waiting for the drug to sink in deeper. Maybe one of its metabolites had some additional effect he was waiting for.

When he turned back to me, his body language was strangely confident. "If you don't want to answer my questions, perhaps Phillipa might."

I looked up at him as my mind wheeled.

"Phillipa?" I asked. There was no way he could know that name.

"Your contact in the city police," Coil said. "We have her in the next room."

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. I took a deep breath to try and push back the nausea, and deadpanned, "Really."

Even through the drug haze, I knew there was no way Coil had Phillipa locked up in a cell. There were several reasons it was impossible, chief among them was that 'Phillipa' didn't exist.

Phillipa was a code word, a private signal to whoever I was speaking with. It meant trouble. Specifically, it was the signal that I was under duress, and close to breaking.

I'd used similar passwords in the past, but I'd only given the cipher to a small handful of people, and none of them would have been easy targets or willing partners with Coil.

Could he be working on one of those people in an adjacent room? Faultline, maybe, or one of my old teammates from the PRT, someone trying to ask for my help using my own system. If that were true, why wouldn't he just threaten me with _their_ lives. The ploy he was trying here spoke of ignorance.

"What has she told you so far?" I asked, trying to work out whether the chemicals were affecting my reasoning, or if the situation really made as little sense as it seemed.

"I'm afraid so far she's been too distressed to say much at all," he said, and there was a smile in his voice, "but I'm sure once she recovers, she'll be quite cooperative."

My neck felt slack, and I could feel a line of drool crawling down from the corner of my mouth. My mind was swimming, punch drunk, and I struggled to concentrate on what the situation was telling me.

In all the narcotic jumble of thoughts and theories, I felt pieces of information snapping together that wouldn't normally fit. In my insensible state, I was making leaps that were in no way logical, but were, I was sure, correct.

"You're a parahuman," I said finally, my words slurring as I tried to articulate. "I wasn't sure before, but it's true."

Coil was silent. Cold reading someone in a mask was difficult. Doing it to someone as disciplined as Coil was next to impossible. Under the influence of a potentially a tinker-tech chemical cocktail was doubly or triply impossible. I was left trying to parse his lack of body language.

"What's your power?" I asked. "Memory alteration?"

Coil remained silent, and perfectly still.

"How long have I been here? Days?" I asked. I certainly wouldn't be completely recovered from this kind of drug in less than a day. "How many times have you interrogated me?"

He didn't move, even the slightest inch, and in that moment I thought I had him.

It was the only thing that fit. In my mad, half-deluded intoxication, it was the only explanation that made sense. He'd interrogated me at some forgotten point in the past, and through some insight, or logical deduction, or sheer desperation, I'd infiltrated my responses with a code word. Coil had taken it as a true answer, and was trying to use against me.

I couldn't imagine what had been going through my mind to give that word. Had I been hoping his follow up searches for Phillipa would trip an alarm set by one of my few friends? Had I made an intuitive leap about his power? Had I just been screaming every prepared response I could think of under the stress of what he'd done to me? I had no way of knowing.

"You're raving," Coil said finally, his tone showing no sign of discomfort. "Let me help you back to reality. You were the beneficiary of a data theft from the city hall several days ago. What were you looking for?"

"You can't win, Coil," I went on, ignoring his question. "I don't remember what I've already told you, but you do. I know that you know, and you know I know you know, ad infinitum. You can't trust any information I give you not to tip your hand."

At some point I started laughing, and the next coherent thing I remember was Coil knocking an elaborate staccato on the cell door. It opened to reveal the medical goon who'd dosed me.

"He's having a bad reaction to the drug," Coil told the guard, stepping out into the corridor. "We'll give him a little time to cool off."

"There's only one of you Coil," I shouted after him. My eyes were unfocused, and I felt on the edge of hysteria.

The door slammed closed and left me alone in the dark. It took a while to return to any kind of ordered thought. Minutes, or maybe hours. The first thing I found was that my face and clothes were all damp with sweat.

It would be a while before I'd be ready to be dosed again, so I guessed I had some time. Time to think, time to plan, and if he'd really been so careless as to leave me alone with the tray of my equipment, time to escape. 


End file.
